Using the PowerPoint to Silverlight exporter

While exploring the web for XAML tools and utilities, I came across this nice ‘PowerPoint to Silverlight Exporter’ utility.This nice little tool can be downloadedÃ‚Â here : http://www.codeplex.com/pptx2silverlight. When I ran it , I was surprised by its simple user interface. I quickly created a sample PowerPoint presentation for testing. In my presentation, I added slides containing:

Screenshot of my website.

Different fonts.

Clipart

My presentation looked something like this:

Sample presentation created using PowerPoint.

Then, in the ‘PowerPoint to Silverlight Exporter’ , I uploaded this presentation file and clicked on the link to convert. I was surprised to see an IE window open, containing my presentation hosted inside Silverlight Plugin.

PowerPoint to Silverlight Converter UI.

The utility seems to have a small builtin webserver for running the Silverlight application it generates. The Silverlight application exported by it, contained thumbnail view, navigation buttons andÃ‚Â a fullscreen button.

The exported Silverlight application.

I was curious to find the physical location of the output on my disk, so checked the configuration file of the utility located in ‘C:\Program Files\HCL\PPTConverter’.Ã‚Â It showed me this:

<add key=”BaseAddress” value=”C:\PPT2SilverlightData” />

Exploring this location, I found the files generated after exporting test.ppt where stored inÃ‚Â ‘C:\PPT2SilverlightData\CustomWebServer\MyWebServerRoot\Test.ppt’ folder.

Though this utility is interesting, it seems to be converting individual slides to images. It does not actually convert elements of the presentation to XAML objects.Ã‚Â I think this would be too much to ask for. But if it ever happens, I can use PowerPoint to create cool Silverlight applications